Toldja. His “decorations” were too many and too showy. Damned few people have even a tiny fraction of what he said he’d earned, and those that do, are almost without exception reserved and humble about them.

By humble, I mean that they realize that another man might have just as well earned that decoration, that chance or fate strike many down before their heroic efforts can be graced with success, and that the man who won the award knows that on other days he knew fear just like the rest of us mortals, and passed up chances to be a hero.

Now Mr. Bush wants to claim that veterans, as a class, have been insulted. He has it exactly backwards. He has been insulted, with the perfectly correct guess that he didn’t earn all that fruit salad, or indeed, any of it. Veterans have been accorded the respect that goes with the estimate that it is unlikely that any man with that level of distinction would have done anything so wicked.

It is not an insult to veterans to hedge this with the realistic caveat that heroism in combat is not an absolute guarantee of good character. Benedict Arnold fought bravely at Saratoga.